Forced Attention Seeking - unethical/irrelevant way of stealing attention

We are again back to the media buzz period, where the user rights are taken for granted. The forced push of Ad's and other media materials are coming to limelight again. After some time where we were speaking much about permission marketing, user requested campaign, high conditions on the buzz for rolling credit cards and personal loan offers without users interests... NOW, EVERYTHING IS BACK. In the scene of economic recession, every company want to be alive and get some business. In the midst of this, the user rights and user privacy is completely violated.

This doesnt stop just with products of generality, this also goes to products like Viagra, Candom being forced by the adservers unbeleivably to sites which never has seen those before. Interstitial ad's which was a smart way of making people to see that till the page in the website was loaded was not there for few days, but now, almost many of the top sites are now again with loads of interstitial ad's in almost every section. The awareness and sense of user privacy and permission based system are definitely spreading across the globe, but the usage of those are seriosly coming down. The economic recession is bringing back those days of traditional forced marketing structure that proved economic to these companies some years back.

The streets are again crowded with people asking your phone numbers by handing over brochures which says fill it and we will get the world free. And this to the economy of the normal user is also coming to a substitute, anything given free of cost is money saved, so the mobile number db owners are again starting to spread their business by selling it to corporates who can flood their marketing campaigns. When i say this, there is no constructive marketing happening, Any constructive marketing comes with a very proper research, process and procedure in place.

I can give you an excellent example (ofcourse not related to internet), dont want to name a credit card company, one of the executive of company X got a card, and seriously got calls and pestering from the Credit card call centre guys to refer friends etc.. after a point in time, he lost his temper and referred few of his friends, one being his boss (VP) of that company. The CC company has rejected VP's request saying he is not eligible for applying for that card. Knowing that VP myself, he is a independent person, without any debt and a very strong financially backed person. All he could do when the CC company told him that he is not eligible is to take photocopies of cards (foreign club cards) where he can get credit worth USD 100,000. Such is the haphazard process these companies carry out. Not all corporates fall in this category.. There are few genuine corporates who have a great rating system.

In the name of econimic recession, companies are again trying to make use of their parasitical marketing system and again make the consumers victim of this. Any change and imbalance happening anywhere would affect the consumers - This time is a perfect example for the same.

Since the traditional mediums are going this way, can we save atleast the internet media not becoming cluttered and wrongly prepared during such times. I would finish this by quoting one website (without naming it) where it has published the jobs which are called in the layoff list and also giving a heading if you dont have job now and if you are looking for one pls submit your resume here. and in the top of it goes a banner of a company that is in matrimonial business and in the right there is a vertical ad of a "yatch company - saying Live your life in luxury".. the worst part is this Ad would come to the full page and only after seeing this flash the ad goes to the right. So a job seeker has to see a matrimonial ad, then a Yatch sellers Ad and then see the page and put his resume, because he is laid off by his company.. Can you see the irony or the pathetic situation and feeling that a user might have to undergo dealing with such sites. A total sixer to online ethics

Lets bring back those days again, where in online user privacy and rights are protected and forced attention seeking is completely taken out.

Sathish Sampath
www.sathishsampath.com